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Chapter 1: What sparked the deadly race for spices between Spain and Portugal?
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Stories of spices that came from the very edge of the world. Clothes, nutmeg, tiny and unremarkable looking, but with the power to ignite the taste buds, heal the body. and make people astonishingly wealthy. Spices could be worth more than gold. But no European knew precisely where they came from. And on the Iberian Peninsula, it would become a deadly race to discover the source.
In 1511, after a 90-year search, enduring storms, hunger and violence, Portuguese ships slipped into a chain of volcanic islands scattered across a brilliant equatorial ocean, the Moluccas, modern-day Indonesia, the only place where cloves and nutmeg grow. The air was thick with fragrance, nutmeg hanging in trees, the yet-to-be-harvested red-split fruit.
This was the source of the world's most valuable trade, just three small rocky islands. But these islands weren't empty prizes waiting to be claimed. They were already alive with established communities and trade networks of local and foreign merchants negotiating the flow of spices and money reasonably peacefully.
But as was so often the case in this period, Europeans announced they didn't really want to be part of this collaborative network. They wanted control of the whole thing. They saw this as a prize to be controlled, monopolized, and kept out of the hands of their European rivals. Because the Portuguese weren't the only ones.
Hot on their heels were the Spanish, themselves also seeking the riches of the Spice Islands, led by a name that you may be familiar with, Ferdinand Magellan, whose fleet would eventually be the first to circumnavigate the globe. The spice race between the Spanish and Portuguese in the 16th century marked the beginning really of a truly globalised world.
The rise and clash of world empires, not on their home soil, but in distant lands, fought directly but also through proxy wars, diplomacy and trade. It ushered in a new age of maritime powers. It established a brutal model for how Europeans would colonize the world, taking what they wanted, whatever the cost.
To tell this incredible story, I'm really happy to be joined by the esteemed historian Roger Crowley, whose excellent book Spice delves far deeper into the subject that we're going to get through in one episode of Danso's History Hit, but we're going to try our best. Enjoy. Enjoy. Roger, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. How are you doing?
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Chapter 2: How did the Portuguese discover the Moluccas and its valuable spices?
And so this feeling of being in hock, if you like, to Islam was one that was of particular interest and aggravation, I think, to Europe at this time.
This is where the story gets crazy, Roger, because of all the various, you know, you've talked about the Holy Roman Empire. Europe's divided, but there are powers within Europe. Nobody, nobody has ever paid any attention to what is going on on the western tip of the Iberian Peninsula before. Why does this little tiny region of Europe end up having such a massive global impact?
Well, it's very interesting, isn't it? I mean, the Portuguese, who are going to be, if you like, the pioneers of... Atlantic expansion was an incredibly poor little country, population of about a million, too poor to mint its own gold coins. Facing the wrong way, you could say, because whatever economic action there was within the Mediterranean,
And they're slightly barricaded by their neighbor, Castile, on whom they're not on good terms. Portugal has nothing. It has no natural resources. But what it does have is, because they've got this long Atlantic coast, they are the first candidates, if you like, to crack the code of the Atlantic Ocean and to start making voyages down the coast of Africa and to work out how the wind systems work.
to explore the west coast of Africa and to jump off the edge of the known world. So it's this very small country of no importance at all that is going to be the front runner in an expansion into the wider world.
And why? Why Portugal? They've just got nowhere else to go and they're feeling adventurous. Are there changes in technology or cartography? What precipitates this? It's one of the great questions in history.
What precipitated this, I think, was they were also very keen on crusading, as most people were, and they had some knowledge of North Africa. It was almost down to individuals. John I, the king of Portugal at the end of the 14th century, There was an Anglo-Portuguese alliance. He was married to Philip of Lancaster, who was the daughter of John of Gaunt.
And that introduced into the mindset of the Portuguese royal family. I mean, the children of this alliance were cousins of Henry V, and therefore they were kind of inspired by this parallel idea of doing great deeds, of doing wonderful things. So part of this Anglo-Portuguese alliance conjured up a spirit of adventure of noble and heraldic deeds that created a climate in which they were going to
spring out beyond Portugal into a new world. It was cast somewhat as a crusade because they knew that there were Muslims in North Africa and on the African coast. So it was sort of like an Arthurian court, if you like. It wasn't quite the same as a merchant culture, which was going there to get goods. These were a culture of doing great deeds, doing heroic things.
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Chapter 3: What role did Ferdinand Magellan play in the spice race?
And the only reason that we know this guy, Bartolomeu Dias, had actually found his way around the Cape, the crew wouldn't go any further. They were frightened they were going to fall off the edge of the world. The only reason we know about this is that Columbus was in Portugal at the time and made a marginal note in his diary.
But this is the point at which suddenly we've learned something about the world that we didn't know. That yes, there is a way around Africa. Ptolemy's geography, which thought that land wrapped all the way around the Indian Ocean, you couldn't get into it. Suddenly they realized they could get into it.
And this is now the springboard for a major attempt to work its way into what will be known as the Indian Ocean and to try and get to the source of spices.
And let's just quickly talk about spice once again. We're talking pepper, cloves, nutmeg. How rare had those things been in Europe before this?
The rarest would have been cloves and nutmeg because they came from the furthest away, but they were expensive. These things were expensive. The markup could be 1,000% from source to consumer.
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Chapter 4: How did the spice trade influence European globalization in the 16th century?
It's very difficult for us now to understand exactly why spices had this... magical attraction for people. And it's a whole range of things. They thought they were analgesics, that they were antiseptics, they were aphrodisiacs, that they conjured up an idea of paradise out there, a better world.
And behind this, of course, we have to factor in the influence of Marco Polo's travels of the world out there that was rich and stuff. and another Italian called Lodovico di Vathema at the end of the 15th century, who wrote an account of getting to the Spice Islands. There was in the minds of these people an idea of an Eden, of a paradise. So all these things wrapped around it.
Also, I think on some level, it just cheered up very dull food. But it's difficult for us to comprehend the kind of magnetic hold that this paradise of perfume, of gorgeous things, the spice trade conjured up and that they just sniffed at a very expensive price.
Well, having eaten a bit of medieval food, I'm aware of just how valuable those spices must have been to cheer it up a bit. My goodness me. But you've also got this heady, heady, intoxicating combination of, if you head into the Indian Ocean, not only can you get spices, cut out the middleman and make a gigantic markup, just slightly less than the thousand percent markup that's already going on.
So you make a lot of money. You also drain trade and wealth away from your great strategic and religious competitor, the Islamic world. and in fact, possibly outflank them and maybe even get to Jerusalem. I mean, this is exciting stuff as the Portuguese are heading into the Indian Ocean.
You're right. There are two things going on here. One is just getting the stuff. And this is going to make us all extraordinarily wealthy. But Manuel II, king of Portugal, had a messianic mission behind this, was that by outflanking Islam, going back to the beginning here, the idea that Europe was being throttled by Islam, by the Ottomans along North Africa and so on, by outflanking Islam,
Manuel had the idea that they could sail up the Red Sea, capture the body of the Prophet Muhammad, hold it to ransom, and recapture Jerusalem. So there is a mixture of trade and crusading going on here. And the Portuguese were nuts about crusading. Their other hobby, apart from sailing, was crusading in Morocco.
which eventually will lead to the total wiping out of the whole of the Portuguese nobility and including the king at the end of the 15th century. So there are two things, and they're definitely linked together. But generally, on the whole, the average Joseph going out there wasn't terribly interested in crusading. They were much more interested in getting some stuff.
And I think the royal geo-strategy was confined pretty much to the... Well, not entirely, but there are certainly some horrible acts of violence by the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean against Muslim ships and people. So the two go hand in hand.
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